Thursday, December 1, 2016

Life on Venus

The golden age of science fiction often
imagined Venus as a jungle world, steamy and wet, where shipwrecked astronauts
were driven insane by the incessant pounding of tropical downpours, as in Ray
Bradbury’s ‘The Long Rain’.

The reality of Venus is a world that’ssearingly hot, covered in toxic clouds and
with a corrosive atmosphere that’s inimical to life as we know it. But, just as
the current exploration of Mars is finding evidence that surface water was once
present on that arid planet, another group of scientists is investigating the
history of our warmer sister planet.

Earth and Venus have a lot in common:
they’re about the same size and density, and the fact that they formed around
the same time in the primordial solar system suggests they share a lot of the
same materials. Venus has a high ratio of deuterium to hydrogen atoms in its
atmosphere, which suggests the planet contained a substantial amount of water
at one time that could – as on Earth – have hosted the building blocks of life.
NASA is currently considering two options for remote exploration of Venus,
including a high resolution mapping mission and the tortuously acronymed Deep
Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI)
mission, both of which could rewrite our understanding of Venus and how we
think about potentially life-bearing extra-solar planets in the future.

This article originally appeared in Beyond,
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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks